Jeroen Linssen writes:
As organizers of the Special Interest Group (SIG) on Serious Games and Social Simulation (SSSG), we would like to invite you to consider submitting a paper for our special session at the 2015 Social Simulation Conference (SSC). This will take place from September 14-18 in Groningen, The Netherlands and the current deadline for full papers, extended abstracts and posters is set to April 13th.
If you submit work on this topic, we kindly ask you to select our session during the submission process of your work. You can do so by ticking the box “SIG session Social Simulation and Serious Games”. This way, all papers on the interplay between social simulation and serious games will be grouped and we can have a fruitful session with people working on similar research as yours.
In our SIG, we focus on the interplay between social simulation and serious games. We wish to bring together researchers working on both fields to a crossroads at which synergies will be created between the two areas. In SSSG, we investigate how the fields of social simulation and serious games are linked. In particular, we focus on the following topics:
- Serious game design. Which level of abstraction is chosen for a serious game? Will it be close to a strict simulation or will it incorporate extensive metaphors? What are the factors based on which this choice is to be made? Which (serious) game mechanics are useful?
- Modelling the social situation. Which approach captures the situation with sufficient granularity? How should a choice be made to include specific theories and models that describe the situation? For example, using a data-driven methodology, how can the steps be made from data to theory to application (and game mechanics)? For agent-based modelling, how can artificially intelligent agents be made that act according to a specified model?
- Example implementations. Stories of success and failure: which elements in a serious game that includes social interaction turn out to be useful and which are counter-productive to the game’s goal? Which elements of social simulations can be used in the design of serious games?
